It is increasingly important in motor vehicle control to capture the surroundings of a motor vehicle. To provide the particular properties of the autonomous driving function or of the driver assistance function, autonomous driving functions, as well as driver assistance functions are thereby based on automatically detecting the driving environment of the vehicle. Radar, lidar sensors, video sensors, cameras, ultrasonic sensors, etc., are typically considered to be suited for sensing driving environments.
With regard to driver assistance functions, in particular, past development trends began with individual sensor technologies and continued towards the use of a multitude of sensors. These sensors each deliver measurement data that can be analyzed to determine position and/or orientation. Such systems thereby require means for fusing data from the various sensors. Thus, fusing the results from a plurality of sensors makes it possible to improve a localization of the vehicle relative to the environment thereof. The number of sensors required for automated driving tends to be greater than the number required for a simple driver assistance function, so that an automated driving system can have 10 or 20 sensors, for example, that deliver a correspondingly greater amount of data than is typical of driver assistance systems.
German Patent Application No. DE 10 2011 086 402 A1 describes a method and a driver assistance system for capturing a vehicle environment; on the one hand, an optical sensor system being linked via an image processing module and object detection module to a module for further processing, and, on the other hand, an ultrasonic system being linked via an ultrasonic signal-processing module to the same. The module for further processing has a data fusion module in which the data from the image processing module and the ultrasonic signal-processing module are merged.
Against this background, there is a need in related-art driving-environment sensing systems for vehicles, for optimizing the data fusion of sensor data in order to enhance the performance for processing the sensor data, thereby enabling the driving environment to be captured quickly and robustly.